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Over the past weeks, I have travelled throughout the length and breadth of our city to see the state of basic service delivery for myself. On the one hand, our city already delivers better services to residents than any other city in South Africa. On the other hand, listening to residents and hearing their concerns has confirmed the scale of the remaining challenges. This has also strengthened my resolve to get much more done to take basic service provision to the next level.

Cape Town is already the best city to live in in South Africa. But we can no longer be content with comparing ourselves only with the woeful delivery standards in the rest of the country when most other cities in South Africa are falling apart. The Mother City can only take its rightful place among the great cities of the world when every Capetonians has access to the services they need to live a dignified life. Now is the time to set our sights higher than ever before by using international rather than domestic service standards as our benchmark.

That is why I am today announcing that the second of my seven pledges to the people of Cape Town is to do the basics better and take service delivery into the digital age.

In my many discussions with residents, it has become clear that the City’s C3 fault reporting system does not fully exploit the power of digital technology to improve service delivery. The C3 system allows residents to request the City to fix everything from potholes to flooded sewers. But, in addition to many people not knowing about its existence, the system’s interface is outdated and not user friendly, especially when used on a mobile phone. It is also inaccessible for the many Capetonians who simply cannot afford high data costs.

To turn the vision of doing the basics better and taking service delivery into the digital age, the DA will:

• Increase investment in basic service delivery over the next five years in order to reduce the infrastructure backlog, upgrade sewerage systems, speedily repair potholes and streetlights, combat illegal dumping, remove refuse more frequently, upgrade primary healthcare clinics, and enhance the provision of free basic services to indigent households;
• Review the City’s contract management system to strengthen oversight and ensure that service delivery is never interrupted anywhere in Cape Town due to the expiry of contracts or non-performance by contractors;
• Respond rapidly to service interruptions by upgrading the outdated C3 fault reporting system to become a modern mobile-first application, which will empower every resident with a cell phone to request services directly from the city through the app or through other communications platforms like WhatsApp and SMS;
• Fully integrate all public participation processes into the upgraded app to empower residents to actively take part in all of the city’s planning and budgeting processes using only their cell phone;
• Undertake negotiations with cell phone providers to zero-rate the upgraded service delivery app, thereby making its use free and empowering the poorest Capetonians to participate in municipal decisions and log service requests without the need to pay for data or visit a municipal office;
• Launch a sustained city-wide communications campaign to ensure that Capetonians are empowered and encouraged to use the application to quickly report service delivery issues;
• Reduce the need for Capetonians to stand in endless queues by fully digitising routine processes like driver’s licence renewals and by digitising the appointment process for visits to municipal facilities; and
• Form partnerships with Cape Town’s thriving technology sector to ensure that our city moves to the cutting edge of using technology to improve service delivery.

Despite the sustained progress our city has made over the past decade, the sheer scale of the challenges we still face in Cape Town requires us to fully exploit any and all tools at our disposal to improve and speed-up the delivery of quality basic services. That is why I am not only committed to significantly expanding the financial investment in basic service provision, but to also turn Cape Town into South Africa’s only digital-first city that does the basics better for all residents.

Issued by The DA